What is more extraordinary, the mind-blowing developments in artificial intelligence or the simple fact of existence?
This question was prompted by a recent article on Artificial Intelligence in the Globe and Mail by Ian Brown, titled “The peril and promise of artificial intelligence”. The question led to two trips down memory lane. Fifty years ago, as a university undergrad, I studied Henry Adams, the American author. In the early 1860s, despite forecasting that man would one day “be able to cruise in space,” he concluded, “Man has mounted science and is now run away with.”
The idea of “the Singularity,” the moment when AI transcends human intelligence and becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, predicted for 2045, was advanced by computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil. To the question, Does God exist, he responds, “Not yet.”
Another perspective is provided by the 12-Step community that deals with addictive behaviour. That community, as Rabbi Harry Brechner of Victoria’s Congregation of Emanu-El has said, “understands ego as an acronym for ‘Edging God Out.’” Whether God is a being or being itself or the Generative Mystery, I like that acronym. I also like the Sufi notion of God as Guest, which helps protect us from self-centredness. Whether we can make room for this extraordinary Guest strikes me as a critical question as humanity grapples with existential threats on multiple fronts.
This question reminded me of reading Erich Fromm’s Psychoanalysis and Religion in the early 1980s, particularly his repeated contention that “there is a core of ideas and norms common to… the thinking of Lao-tse, Buddha, the Prophets, Jesus, Spinoza, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment.” The simplest expression of this commonality is the Golden Rule, which is found in all major religions. In Confucianism, for example, loving kindness and the injunction “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself” are the sum of good conduct.
Yet efforts by individuals to adhere to the Golden Rule are often countered by our economic system. An April Times Colonist letter commented, “What we see on the streets is us. It is a mirror. It is our society’s unchallenged beliefs…” The letter-writer added, “The grand design of our entire economy diverts vast portions of our wealth and energies to untaxed billionaires…” In 1971, the highest-income Canadians paid “approximately 70 per cent in federal taxes”; now it’s about 30 per cent. Some members of the one per cent, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, contend “that they … need to pay way more taxes.”
As is, the economic system co-opts virtually all of us in one way or another. But its malignancies are becoming more evident, from spreading social breakdown to the increasingly apparent limits of our finite planet. Consider the life-or-death decision confronting the fossil fuel industry. Its “untapped deposits are ‘listed as assets by the corporations that have located them,’ and are worth hundreds of trillions of dollars,” according to The New Yorker. “If even a sixth of this carbon hoard is burned, we’ll burn, too.”
Kurzweil is equally ominous when he says “the last thing we need to invent” is the capacity for machines to improve themselves as they learn. “Once we invent that, the machines will outstrip us. The only question then will be, will the machines keep us around?”
But AI and climate change aren’t our biggest challenges. Our biggest challenge is how we think about ourselves and our existence. Maya Angelou’s poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” maintains “we are the possible, we are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.” That is, if we allow ourselves to think and act as such, which would mean developing an economic system guided by the Golden Rule.
Patrick Wolfe is the author of ‘A Snake on the Heart – History, Mystery, and Truth: The Entangled Journeys of a Biographer and His Nazi Subject’, about a junior non-commissioned officer in the Dutch SS who became a British Columbia social worker and foster parent. The book’s prologue can be read at https://patrickswolfe.com/
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking at https://www.timescolonist.com/blogs/spiritually-speaking
* This article was published in the print edition of the Times Colonist on Saturday, August 5th 2023
